The folks at the New York Public Library have a workflow and python script for translating historical maps into Minecraft. It’s a three-step (quite big steps) process. First, they generate a DEM (digital elevation model) from the historical map, using QGIS. This is saved as ‘elevation.tiff’. Then, using Inkscape, they trace over the features from […]
A Ferguson Twitter Archive Much has been written about the significance of Twitter as the recent events in Ferguson echoed round the Web, the country, and the world. I happened to be at the Society of American Archivists meeting 5 days after Michael Brown was killed. During our panel discussion someone asked about the role […]
Recently Latour outlined his understanding of the digital in an interesting way as part of his plenary lecture at Digital Humanities 2014 conference. He was honest in accepting that his understanding may itself be a product of his own individuation and pre-digital training as a scholar which emphasised close-reading techniques and agonistic engagement around a […]
How should digital humanities scholars develop research questions? Spurred on by this recent conversation on twitter, I figured I would lay out a few different ways to go about answering this question about questions. The gist of the dialog is that Jason Heppler suggested that one should “Fit the tool to the question, not the […]
The following is a guest post from Euan Cochrane, Digital Preservation Manager at Yale University Library. This piece continues and extends exploration of the potential of emulation as a service and virtualization platforms. Increasingly, the intellectual productivity of scholars involves the creation and development of software and software-dependent content. For universities to act as responsible stewards […]
There has been a great deal of buzz lately about “making” and production-centered learning. As a professor of literature and writing, I have been enthusiastic about the role “making” might play in the classroom. (Even those classrooms or courses that don’t inherently seem to lend themselves to making in the most obvious sense.) But the […]
XFR STN (“Transfer Station”) is a grass-roots digitization and digital-preservation project that arose as a response from the New York arts community to rescue creative works off of aging or obsolete audiovisual formats and media. The digital files are stored by the Library of Congress’s NDIIPP partner the Internet Archive and accessible for free online. At the […]
When most people think about the kind of super-high-performance games people build custom PCs for, they probably imagine some first-person shooter with fast action, huge explosions, and millions of polygons being rendered to the screen at real time. Few people would think of Dwarf Fortress, a game that is rendered with simple ASCII characters and […]
Trust, privacy, and safety are critical to learning in an open online world. What tools do learners need to navigate, collaborate, and learn online with confidence? What tools and solutions will foster greater civility and respect in online learning environments? Join us as we explore the aspects of creating spaces where “students should have safe and […]
In this post, Lisa Spiro (Rice University) provides an overview of the different facets of digital social sciences, observing points of connection with digital humanities. As a member of a research team investigating the skills and competencies important to digital scholarship, I’ve become interested in what “digital scholarship” means in different disciplines, particularly the social sciences and […]
